Guido sees the light: PEP 8 updated

[Gregory Ewing]

Rustom Mody wrote:
> Come to think of it take an SQL DBMS browser.
> Should we say: Horizontal scrolls are BAD; just reformat the table after reaching 80 columns?

I would say, yes, horizontal scrolling *is* bad in a table --
probably even worse than it is for text or code.

The reason is that tables are usually laid out so that
data items in a row are related to each other. You can't
make sense of a piece of data in the table without seeing
the other items in the same row. That's hard to do if
you can't see the whole row at once.

> In fact much of the point of 
> http://blog.languager.org/2012/10/layout-imperative-in-functional.html
> is just this: that as code becomes more and more data-ish,
> a more-lines-less-columns regime becomes correspondingly irksome.

I draw the opposite conclusion. The more your code is
laid out like a table, the more important it is to be
able to see the whole width of it at once.

Your Haskell lexer example looks all very nice in a
good wide browser window. But reduce it so you can only
see half of it at a time and then tell me how readable
it is.

-- 
Greg